I'm proud to announce that we've just gone live with an updated feature set and look to our Election Watch 2004 site, politics.technorati.com. You'll notice a few big changes, and a bunch of smaller, more subtle changes and fixes. We've changed the orientation of the site away from posting the most recent posts by authoritative political bloggers (although you can still get to that view in 3-pane, liberal, conservative, RNC, or combined view) to one that focuses on where the authoritative political bloggers are spending their attention - what we are calling the Politics Attention Index™.

The Attention Index measures the blog posts, news articles, and other places on the Internet where bloggers are pointing. This is similar to what Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, or even Technorati's own NewsTalk is doing, but we are limiting the set of bloggers to the ~10,000 most authoritative political bloggers, which we derived by looking at both what bloggers write about as well as how many other political bloggers are linking to them. This is also how we analyzed blogs to find the most authoritative liberal and conservative bloggers, and where they're spending their attention over the last 12 hours (here's the Liberal Attention Index, and the Conservative Attention Index). Note that you'll sometimes find the same items discussed by both liberals and conservatives, but often the items are quite different, or the amount of attention spent is quite different. These authoritative political bloggers became a collaborative filter for events going on in the world - helping to filter out the most interesting and important things going on around the political blogosphere.

We've also added charts and graphs! Working with the folks at CNN, we're tracking the histories and comparisons of some of the major players and stories going on in the political world. We'll be updating the charts that you can see with others as topics emerge at and after the conventions.

As always, we're looking for your feedback! There's a lot we did that are improvements on the old design, but I know there's still a lot that can be made even better. Let me know what you think of things, and how we can be of service to you.

Kudos to the entire Technorati team - you guys made this happen. I'm really proud of you.